I didn't even plan to buy this book though I've seen it displayed in National Bookstore for quite some time now. But the thing is, a friend from the office borrowed and lost my copy of Shannon Hale's The Princess Academy all on the same day. She had a fight with a close friend, stormed out of the office, and promptly lost my book. So in exchange, she bought me this. Well, technically I bought this myself because I was with her when she bought it and it's a replacement of the book she lost. There was no longer a copy of Hale's book, so we tried to find something else. So I picked this instead based solely on what was written on the back cover (I couldn't read the first few pages of the book because it was, like almost every other fiction books in the store, tightly covered in plastic acetate).
The back cover says:
This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. In the face of this force they can neither prevent nor control, Henry and Clare's struggle to lead normal lives is both intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
We went like, "It has hints of science fiction and love story. We're buying this."
About the lost book
I like the Harry Potter series so much that when Orson Scott Card described Hale's book as something that could make JK Rowling's Hogwarts looked like a caricature of a school I just have to find out for myself what he was talking about. I've read three books of Shannon Hale since reading Card's review and I have to say he's right.
Hale has a talent for bringing real, breathing communities on the pages of her books. In Academy she brought a school to life. But it was in her other book, her first one, The Goose Girl, that one can truly see how good she is in creating real, believable communities. I think that's her niche. In Book of a Thousand Days, she experimented with working almost exclusively with two characters. It's okay, but I didn't like it as much as her books that involved a lot of characters in a community. Her books aren't for everybody, of course. She mainly writes fantasy books and they don't categorized it that way for no reason. Bookstores usually lump this category with "sci-fi", thus making a "sci-fi and fantasy" section and they're probably right. Replace the technology elements in a sci-fi book with magic and you have yourself a fantasy book. But those rebellious few who could read sci-fi but not fantasy probably would not like her books, or at least her fantasy books (I've read she also writes general fiction and graphic novels, with her husband illustrating, though I can't find any of her other works in any bookstores around where I live).
